Yoga for Caregivers is for people who care

Yoga for Caregivers is a universal site for all types of medical, dental and emotional caregivers. Here you can learn techniques to help prevent and restore yourself from the daily work related injuries that effect the body, mind, and spirit.

Stress Buster

Mark T. Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, and a fortune 100 executive, has personal reasons for believing that yoga can reduce stress and lower health care costs. After a skiing accident left him in constant pain and partially paralyzed, he found relief through yoga and alternative medicine, but he doesn’t expect anyone to take it on faith. His teacher Gary Kraftsow partnered with Duke University Medical school conducted a study on the effects of yoga and stress reduction. The study showed significant stress reduction benefits from yoga. About 10% of Atena’s 33,000 workers have taken yoga courses. Bertolini believes that health insurers will eventually pay for mind body therapies if researchers can build an evidence base to prove they work.Read more…

Benefits for Caregivers

A study from the University of California, Los Angeles, finds that practicing yoga each day can improve cognitive functioning and lower levels of depression for caregivers. While medication can improve depression, many caregivers may be opposed to the use of medication because of the associated costs and possible side effects. That consideration motivated Lavretsky and her colleagues to test a mind-body intervention for stress reduction.

The results were “striking,” according to Lavretsky, given the improvements that were shown in mental health, cognition, and telomerase activity over eight weeks at just 12 minutes a day.

Paced Breathing

More than a million American women enter menopause each year in the prime of their lives. Research on preventing or curbing its symptoms is important. In some studies slow, controlled, deep breathing cut the frequency of hot flashes by about half. And researchers in Sweden and Harvard Medical School have shown that relaxing through breath can ease the intensity, and sometimes the intensity of hot flashes.

Strength and Flexibility

Researchers who examined the fitness-related benefits of hatha yoga (the physical postures)studied 10 previously untrained subjects who had no knowledge of yoga (Tran et al. 2001). The subjects participated in twice-weekly sessions of yoga breathing exercises and hatha yoga. After 8 weeks, the subjects showed significant improvements in upper- and lower-body muscular strength, endurance and flexibility; there was no statistically significant change in body composition or pulmonary function (Tran et al. 2001).

Another study compared subjects who performed an average of about 21 hours of hatha yoga classes with a sedentary control group (Boehde et al. 2005). At the end of the 8-week study period, the yoga group showed significant improvements in flexibility, balance and muscular endurance compared with the controls (Boehde et al. 2005).

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For maximum benefit, find a comfortable seat on a chair, a couch, or the floor.

Plug in your headphones or earbuds and enjoy!”

Meditation allows a simple freedom of the mind that is difficult to express in words, but just as emotions are present and cannot be seen. So is this sensation of freedom.